History of Sanitation

100 HISTORY OF SANITATION is a model of careful and extended observation and study, cautious generalizing and rigid verification. It is an excel- lent instance of inductive scientific inquiry by a layman in sanitation. Mr. Whitehead found the number of houses on Broad Street 49; the resident householders 35; the total number of resident inhabitants 896; the total number of deaths among these 90. Deaths among non-residents (workmen, etc.) belonging to the street, 28. Total deaths chargeable to this street alone, 118. Only 10 houses out of 49 were free from cholera. The dates of attack of the fatal cases resident in this single street were as follows: Mr. Whitehead’s detailed investigation was not made until the spring of 1855, but in spite of this fact it supplied most interesting and important confirmatory evidence of Dr. Snow s theory that the Broad Street well was the source of the epidemic. Mr. Whitehead, moreover, went further than Dr. Snow, and endeavored to find out how the well came to be infected, why its infectious condition was so limited, as it appeared to have been, and to answer various other questions which occurred in the course of his inquiry. As a result, he concluded that the well must have been most infected on August 31st, that for some